When nine-year-old, severely autistic Alexander Dorfling is found dead in a bathtub, his mum and main caregiver, Ingrid, falls under the suspicion of investigating detectives. Their delicate lives are excavated in a dark interrogation room by Ingrid’s accusers, in what is ultimately an affecting South African study of attitudes to disability.
The English translation of ‘raaiselkind’ is ‘riddle child’. Alexander is an enigma - and not just in death. At one point, even Ingrid asks, ‘what do you think is going on inside [his] head?’ And, for years, doctors are perplexed about him, ascribing his traits to issues ranging from reflux to cramps, and reeling off uncertain promises about how everything will be resolved.
As autism is finally put forward to his parents as a diagnosis - in highly deficit-based language, it must be said - it’s described in English, contrasting with how the rest of film’s dialogue takes place in Afrikaans - this subtle change underscores how the family has been thrust into unfamiliar territory.
Yet, as screenwriter, Pieter Esterhuizen, has said in interview, ‘the family [does] not break up from the inside. It’s the external factors that cause the chaos’. There’s thick irony in that Alexander’s name is in doting homage to a relative when very few family members are willing to support him, much less make the effort to understand him. Instead, the Dorflings are collectively ‘rejected…forgot…condemned’ by all hitherto forms of social support. Quite literally in the middle of this, halfway through the film, we momentarily witness Alexander’s point of view: the camera sways up-and-down, movingly replicating his self-soothing rocking, and we see his panic-stricken parents realising he’s seen them arguing through the stair risers.
The family’s tenuous bond with their community is obliquely compared with what people in townships have, where a child with a disability is ‘everybody’s child to look after’. And I think the family’s community is lacking through this tenuous bond: through not sharing in the Dorflings’s struggles, they equally miss out on the joys of Alexander, who could make feathers dance.
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